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"But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning."
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"The leaves of hopes which have destined words in the body of the thought have settled to the ground. This is the world."

"The world will see true peace when there are no boundaries of religion and the religion of all will be pure unconditional love."

"We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become."

"The Bible warns [parents] against extremes in dealing with our adult children. It tells us to avoid trying to control [them] once they become adults. When children become independent, a major transition takes place: They are no longer under our authority."

"How can the truth make anything worse?"

"There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby."

"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself."

"Know thyself, presume not God to scan;The proper study of mankind is man."

"I am engaged in spiritual warfare every day. I must never let down my guard-I must keep armed."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood

"With shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before."

"And if I talk to him, I'll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself."

"Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry."

"How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste."

"If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude."

"One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?"

"There were places you didn't want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive."

"I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not."

"The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love."
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